The present invention generally relates to improving the discounting functionality and security of point-of-sale (POS) processing systems, and more particularly relates to authoring, distributing POS processing, and post-processing of substantially improved discount coupons.
Conventional legacy discount coupons have been standardized and in widespread use at many retail stores for many years. Legacy coupons include only two fields, a product category field and a discount type field, each field being 256-bits in length.
The very limited number of fields and limited field length necessitates the use of broad product categories and also results in a limited number of discount types. As a result, these legacy discount coupons are very inflexible and also very susceptible to fraud. For example, an unscrupulous shopper may attempt to present a “$5 discount” coupon, intended for an item retailing for $50, towards the purchase of a significantly lower priced item retailing for $3, assuming that the $3 item is in the same product category as the $50 item. If the sales associate at the point of sale (POS) is not alert and the number of items purchased by the shopper is large enough, then the shopper ends up with a $2 net cash credit towards the purchase of the other items ($3 item minus $5 discount). In other words, the shopper was rewarded a $2 cash credit for merely acquiring the $3 item at no cost.
Hence there is an urgent need for an improved automated POS system capable of processing a wider variety of discounts for a wider variety of products and product categories, while substantially decreasing fraud.